Faded Glory: A Century of Forgotten Texas Military Sites, Then and Now

5. The Mexican Revolution

C h a p t e r 3 104 10 20 10 40 Glenn Spring Downtown El Paso El Paso Camp Holland Camp Ruidosa Fort Stockton T E X A S Mexican Revolution M E X I C O N E W M E X I C O Map by Molly O’Halloran There can no longer be any doubt about it.The bloody Revolution that has long inundated all of Mexico with murder and mayhem has now flowed across the Rio Grande to lap at our very doorstep. —Alpine Avalanche, Alpine,Texas, May 12, 1916 5 Although no formally declared state of war existed between Mexico and the United States during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, armed conflicts between military forces of both nations took place. The best known of these clashes was the attack on Columbus, New Mexico, by the Revolution’s Gen. Francisco “Pancho” Villa on March 9, 1916. This unprovoked and still largely unfathomable invasion of American territory by a foreign military force was the first since the return of the British in the War of 1812. The Columbus Raid in turn immediately prompted Brig. Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing’s ill-fated Punitive Expedition, which marked the first formal invasion of foreign territory by the American army since the Mexican War of 1846. Because it shares as a border with Mexico more than 1,000 miles of the Rio Grande, Texas was directly involved in many aspects of the Revolution. When a Mexican force of indeterminate allegiance struck the remote village of Glenn Spring on the Texas side of the border two months after the Columbus Raid, the War Department ordered a full-scale mobilization of National Guard units. Within two months of the raid, well over 160,000 troops from across the nation had been deployed to a series of outposts hurriedly constructed along the river. Texas towns relatively close to the The Mexican revOlUTiOn 1910–1920 105 border formed civilian home guard companies to stand watch around the clock to repel any further Mexican incursions that ceaseless rumors held to be imminent. The Alpine, Texas, newspaper reported in late April 1916 that the first surprise practice alert was a total failure when not one of the home guard volunteers responded to the call to muster. As a result, officials soon abandoned the entire project. What eventually became known as the Mexican Revolution had a long and fitfully sputtering fuse that ignited years before the shooting began. The basic cause of it all was the increasingly harsh rule of Gen. Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico from 1876 to 1911. As president, Díaz was a paradox. A visionary, he literally prodded his traditionally backward nation toward a belated industrial revolution. He warmly welcomed foreign investors in the development of an infrastructure that he believed would move Mexico into the future and away from her dark agrarian past. His actions led to establishment of a national railroad system, the encouragement of manufacturing , and the expansion of exploration efforts to tap into Mexico’s vast petroleum resources. After the president’s first decade in office, the new Porfirian-era Mexico seemed poised on the threshold of modernity. While his accomplishments were many, his methods were dictatorial. In his haste to break the centuries-old pattern of subsistence farming, Díaz illegally took the agricultural lands historically tended by small families and gave them to the wealthy, powerful land barons who reciprocated his generosity with their loyalty. At the peak of the Porfirian era, only 800 families owned all of Mexico’s 761,000 square miles of land. Under Díaz, the rich became richer and the lower classes, deprived of their land and status, sank into relative peonage . All attempts to undo or even publically protest the inequities and outright corruption rampant in the Porfirian administration proved both futile and dangerous. Those who dared to speak out and seek justice faced imprisonment, torture, execution , or in a few cases, forcible expulsion from the country. Fearing these harsh probabilities , countless numbers of imperiled Mexicans began a mass exodus to Texas as early as 1900, a decade before the actual revolution erupted. Somewhat sketchy U S census statistics indicate that nearly 500,000 Mexicans legally migrated to Texas between 1900 and 1920. As it is unlikely that all who crossed the Rio Grande during that period dared to seek official US documentation, it seems almost...